You can now run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on EC2's Cluster Compute and Cluster GPU instances. As I noted in the post that I wrote last year when this distribution became available on the other instance types, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a proven, commercially supported Linux platform that is ideal for development, test, and production workloads. This is the same operating system that runs the IBM WatsonDeepQA application that competed against a human opponent (and won) on Jeopardy just last month.

Install Linux and Middleware. The article recommends SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. You can run it on a Cluster Compute instance by selecting it from the Launch Instances Wizard:

Launch the instances within the placement group in order to get the 10 Gigabit non-blocking connectivity:

You can use the local storage on the instance, or you can create a 300 GB Elastic Block Store volume for the reference data:

Download Information Sources. Tony recommends the use of NFS to share files within the cluster. That will work just fine on EC2; see the Linux-NFS-HOWTO for more information. He also notes that you will need a relational database. You can use Apache Derby per his recommendation, or you can start up an Amazon RDS instance so that you don't have to worry about backups, scaling or other administrative chores (if you do this you might not need the 300 GB EBS volume created in the previous step):

The Query Panel - Parsing the Question. You can download and install OpenNLP and OpenCyc as described in the article. You can run most applications (open source and commercial) on an EC2 instance without making any changes.

Unstructured Information Management Architecture. This part of the article is a bit hand-wavey. It basically boils down to "write a whole lot of code around the Apache UIMA framework."

Parallel Processing. The original Watson application ran in parallel across 2,880 cores. While this would be prohibitive for a basement setup, it is possible to get this much processing power from AWS in short order and (even more importantly) to put it to productive use. Tony recommends the use of the UIMA-AS package for asynchronous scale-out, all managed by Hadoop. Fortunately, Amazon Elastic MapReduce is based on Hadoop, so we are all set:

Testing. Tony recommends a batch-based approach to testing, with questions stored in text files to allow for repetitive testing. Good enough, but you still need to evaluate all of the answers and decide if your tuning is taking you in the desired direction. I'd recommend that you use the Amazon Mechanical Turk instead. You could easily run A/B tests across multiple generations of results.

I really liked Tony's article because it took something big and complicated and reduced it to a series of smaller and more approachable steps. I hope that you see from my notes above that you can easily create and manage the same types of infrastructure, run the same operating system, and the same applications using AWS, without the need to lift a screwdriver or to max out your credit cards. You could also use Amazon CloudFormation to automate the entire setup so that you could re-create it on demand or make copies for your friends.

The new JumpBox free tier trial for AWS customers lets you launch and run the applications listed above at no charge. There will be a small charge for EBS storage (see below).

If you qualify for the AWS free usage tier it will give you sufficient EC2 time, S3 storage space, and internet data transfer to host the application and to handle a meaningful amount of traffic.

Any AWS user (free or not) can take advantage of JumpBox's offer, paying the usual rates for AWS. The AWS free usage tier is subject to the AWS Free Usage Tier Offer Terms; use of AWS in excess of free usage amounts will be charged standard AWS rates.

Note: The JumpBox machine images are larger than the 10 GB of EBS storage provided in the free usage tier; you'll be charged $1.50 per month (an additional 10 GB of EBS storage per month) if you run them in the free usage tier.

The applications are already installed and configured; there's nothing to set up. The application will run on an EC2 instance of its own; you have full control of the configuration and you can install themes, add-ins, and the like. Each application includes a configuration portal to allow you to configure the application and to make backups.

Here's a tour, starting with the 1-page signup form:

After a successful signup, JumpBox launches the application:

The application will be ready to run in a very short time (less than a minute for me):

The next step is to configure the application (I choose to launch Joomla):

And I am up and running:

You can access all of the administrative and configuration options from a password-protected control panel that runs on the EC2 instance that's hosting the application:

As you can probably see from the tour, you can be up and running with any of these applications in minutes. As long as you are eligible for and stay within the provisions of the AWS free usage tier, you can do this for free. I'm looking forward to hearing your thought and success stories; leave me a comment below.

The folks at ActiveState have cooked up an ActivePython AMI to make it easy for you to build and deploy web application written in Python.You can get started in minutes without having to download, install, or configure anything.

The AMI is based on the 64-bit version of Ubuntu and includes MySQL, SQLite, Apache, ActivePython, Django, Memcached, Nginx, and a lot of other useful components. You can run the AMI on the Micro, Large, and Extra Large instance types.

The new Amazon EC2 VM Import Connector is a virtual appliance (vApp) plug-in for VMware vCenter. Once installed, you can import virtual machines from your VMware vSphere infrastructure into Amazon EC2 using the GUI that you are already familiar with. This feature builds on top of the VM Import feature that I blogged about late last year.

The Connector stores separate AWS credentials for each vCenter user so that multiple users (each with separate AWS accounts) can use the same Connector. The account must be subscribed to EC2 in order to use the Connector.

You can download the Connector from the AWS Developer Tools page. You'll need to make sure that you have adequate disk space available, and you'll also need to verify that certain network ports are open (see the EC2 User Guide for more information). The Connector is shipped as an OVF template that you will deploy with your vSphere Client.

After you've installed and configured the Connector, you can import any virtual machine that needs the following requirements:

Runs Windows Server 2008 SP2 (32 or 64 bit).

Currently turned off.

Uses a single virtual hard drive (multiple partitions are OK) no larger than one terabyte.

Importing is a simple matter of selecting a virtual machine and clicking on the Import to EC2 tab:

The import process can take a couple of hours, depending on the speed and utilization of your Internet connection. You can monitor the progress using the Tasks and Events tab of the vSphere Client.

As is always the case with AWS, we started out with a core feature (VM Import) and are now adding additional capabilities to it. Still on the drawing board (but getting closer every day) are additional features such as VM Export (create a virtual machine image from an EC2 instance or AMI), support for additional image formats and operating systems.

When you create an Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) DB Instance you need to specify the desired times for the daily backup window and the weekly maintenance window:

If you have enabled backups for a particular DB Instance (by setting the Backup Retention Period to a non-zero value), Amazon RDS will create a snapshot backup at some point within the Backup Window. Effective immediately, we are reducing the duration of the Backup Window from two hours to thirty minutes.

We use the Maintenance Window to install patches and to take care of other maintenance issues on an as-needed basis. This doesn't actually happen very often; we performed just two maintenance operations during the last year. Again, effective immediately, we are reducing the duration of the Maintenance Window from four hours to thirty minutes.

If you are running a Multi-AZ deployment of Amazon RDS, backups and maintenance occur on your standby instance, minimizing any impact on the primary instance.

If you have not defined a custom backup or maintenance window and used the default value provided by Amazon RDS for any of your existing DB Instances, note that the default window dates and times will be changed on March 14, 2011. Please refer to this forum post for more information.

I have made many visits to Japan over the last several years to speak at conferences and to meet with developers. I really enjoy the people, the strong sense of community, and the cuisine.

Over the years I have learned that there's really no substitute for sitting down, face to face, with customers and potential customers. You can learn things in a single meeting that might not be obvious after a dozen emails. You can also get a sense for the environment in which they (and their users or customers) have to operate. For example, developers in Japan have told me that latency and in-country data storage are of great importance to them.

Although I can't share the exact location of the Region with you, I can tell you that private beta testers have been putting it to the test and have reported single digit latency (e.g. 1-10 ms) from locations in and around Tokyo. They were very pleased with the observed latency and performance.

Existing toolkit and tools can make use of the new Tokyo Region with a simple change of endpoints. The documentation for each service lists all of the endpoints for each service.

This offering goes beyond the services themselves. We also have the following resources available:

Put it all together and developers in Japan can now build applications that respond very quickly and that store data within the country.

The JAWS-UG (Japan AWS User Group) is another important resource. The group is headquartered in Tokyo, with regional branches in Osaka and other cities. I have spoken at JAWS meetings in Tokyo and Osaka and they are always a lot of fun. I start the meeting with an AWS update. The rest of the meeting is devoted to short "lightning" talks related to AWS or to a product built with AWS. For example, the developer of the Cacoo drawing application spoke at the initial JAWS event in Osaka in late February. Cacoo runs on AWS and features real-time collaborative drawing.

We've been working with some of our customers to bring their apps to the new Region ahead of the official launch. Here is a sampling:

Zynga is now running a number of their applications here. In fact (I promise I am not making this up) I saw a middle-aged man playing Farmville on his Android phone on the subway when I was in Japan last month. He was moving sheep and fences around with rapid-fire precision!

The enStratus cloud management and governance tools support the new region.

All of the enStratus AMIs are available. The tools feature a fully localized user interface (Cloud Manager, Cluster Manager, User Manager, and Report) that can display text in English, Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, and French.

enStratus also provides local currency support and can display estimated operational costs in JPY (Japan / Yen) and a number of other currencies.

Sekai Camera is a very cool augmented reality application for iPhones and Android devices. It uses the built-in camera on each device to display a tagged, augmented version of what the camera is looking at. Users can leave "air tags" at any geographical location. The application is built on AWS and makes use of a number of services including EC2, S3, SimpleDB, SQS, and Elastic Load Balancing. Moving the application to the Tokyo Region will make it even more responsive and interactive.

Cloudworks is a management tool for AWS built in Japan, and with a Japanese language user interface. It includes a daily usage report, scheduled jobs, and a history of all user actions. It also supports AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and copying of AMIs from region to region.

Browser 3Gokushi is a well-established RPG (Role-Playing Game) that is now running in the new region.

Here's some additional support that came in after the original post:

RightScale has been supporting our Japanese customers during the months leading up to today's release. You can read more about what they do to move to a new region in their newest blog post: RightScale Global: Next Stop Japan.